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Low-grade mental deficients are unlikely ever to become community assets. But I believe that if American women could see what I have seen they would not want to skimp on their care. Take, for instance, what the superintendent of one midwestern institution called "our nudist colony."

"We keep some boys in here who just won't stay dressed," the attendant said. She threw open a door and I was confronted with half a dozen naked adults confined in a damp lavatory. They were fed there too, the attendant told me, from the washbasins that run trough-like along the center. "We wash them out," she hastened to explain.

One of the poor creatures still had enough human initiative to dash into the dayroom. "Get in there!" the attendant exclaimed and he scuttled back.

My visit to Woodbine State Colony, New Jersey, was evidence to me that such conditions need not be. Woodbine is an institution exclusively for low-grade mental deficients. The average mental age of its some eight hundred boys is two years and two months. Precisely as E. L. Johnstone, its superintendent, has written: "The Colony is a world in slow motion, geared to provide a maximum of happiness and joy to the Least of These." To me, he said, when I asked whether I could prove to American women that it paid to teach these children: "I cannot possibly give an economic justification for what we do here. But the reasons for helping these handicapped children to fulfill themselves as much as possible within their limitations are so profound they don't need explanation." He was right. The reasons are spiritual, in the deepest sense of the word.

More than once tears came to my eyes at Woodbine. The attractive table set for the boys in the "best" cottage -- the brightest having a five-year-old mentality -- and the contented mannerly way in which they ate contrasted poignantly with what I had seen at mealtimes elsewhere. There were the little boys in nursery school and their delighted expressions when we applauded their clap-clap dance. There was the middle-aged boy, with a two-year intelligence, who beamingly showed me a piece of embroidery "I'm making for my mama." The eighteen-year-old with an eighteen-month-old's intelligence and lack of speech but an adult's coordination, who found peace and satisfaction in weaving. The pride of the children who had their regular jobs such as shining shoes or pouring milk or shoveling ashes or weeding.

Here the playrooms are real playrooms -- gay with murals inexpensively made by outlining projected lantern slides and letting the children fill in the colors. Flowered paper draperies hang at the windows. On all the sun porches are bright pots of plants.

By means of massage, simple exercises and a consistent policy of "Get them out of bed!" crib cases become walkers. "When I came here," an attendant told me, "twenty of the boys were in bed. Now all but two walk. And," she added emphatically, "those two are going to walk too." Soiling is well under control; children who do not talk have been taught to raise their hands, utter a sound or press their stomachs to indicate a need to go to the bathroom. One youngster, so damaged that the only motion he could make was to contract his fingers, learned to press a rubber whistle as his signal. Surely no mother would settle for less decent humane care for her baby if he were not like other children.

Mental deficients such as those at Woodbine must probably be institutionalized all their lives. But thousands of others -- at present more than a hundred and nine thousand children are in state training schools -- are being institutionalized much longer than necessary. At the same time, scores of mental deficients are kept on waiting lists, often for years.

"If we had the facilities to train children properly and keep them moving out," I was told several times, "we mightn't need more buildings." Meanwhile families are intolerably burdened with the care of the helpless; mental deficients vegetate in jails and almshouses because there is no other place for them to go; and more than ten thousand known to be mentally well are in state hospitals for the mentally sick. At least one state makes no provision at all for feeble-minded Negroes.

Even the ideal institution, however, is not the whole answer to caring for mental deficients. The reasons they must be institutionalized are various and usually have as much to do with their family circumstances as with their IQ's. But most of those who are mentally subnormal, according to Dr. Elise Martens of the United States Office of Education, would get along quite well living at home if communities provided special teaching, guidance clinics, recreation centers and supervision.

HERE and there are promising projects for the care of mental deficients outside institutions. Placement with foster families has been successful in a few states. In a small-scale experiment in New Jersey, a teacher works with a child and parents when a child is on the waiting list. I went with her to several homes where there were Mongolian idiots, born, as they always are, to normal parents, most of whom have other normal children. And they were happy homes. So well have the children come along within their limitations, so much better adjusted have the families become to the child, that of twenty-four who had children on the waiting list seventeen have decided not to institutionalize even should a bed become available.